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What's in a title?

My wife just asked "What's an 'after-sales engineer'?" I parsed the terms, and came up with "Tech Support Dude". As a teenager, I was a Foliage Architect (I mowed lawns), System Builder (computer assembly slave), Network Administrator (very poorly paid, Read More...
Posted Tuesday, June 03, 2008 1:50 PM by Kevin Frei | (Comments Off)

The customer is wrong

I just watched the highly lame “You wouldn’t steal a car…Downloading pirated movies is stealing ” ‘trailer’. How’s this for irony: I watched this trailer because it was the SECOND thing to play on the DVD of Die Read More...
Posted Wednesday, April 02, 2008 9:45 PM by Kevin Frei | 1 Comments

Turning off comments for a while...

The spam bots have been causing me all sorts of trouble - I had over 1000 messages informing me that some spam has been deleted over the weekend. I'm going to kill comments, and hope that in a few months, (after I get a chance to write up something of Read More...
Posted Monday, February 18, 2008 11:31 AM by Kevin Frei | (Comments Off)

Vista x64 Media Center 'fix'

<RETRACTION> Crap. After getting a couple of comments saying they tried the same thing, and it didn't work for them, I went back and tried it myself. And it turns out it doesn't work. I think I had tried it with some media that I had already transcoded Read More...
Posted Friday, September 07, 2007 9:52 AM by Kevin Frei | 7 Comments

How not to benchmark different languages

I've recently been trolling the web for any sort of language-comparision benchmarks, to see how the CLR's JIT stacks up to the competition. Dr. Dobbs has what seemed to be a pretty reasonable micro-benchmark article . It's not particularly insightful, Read More...
Posted Monday, June 11, 2007 12:41 PM by Kevin Frei | 7 Comments

Boost 1.34.0 and how to get it to build for AMD64...

I've recently been deluged by a pile of new electronic gadgets* so that I haven't had time to do much coding. So I was looking around yesterday and found that there's (finally) a new version of Boost available. I was actually underwhelmed by the lack Read More...
Posted Thursday, June 07, 2007 8:37 PM by Kevin Frei | (Comments Off)

How to use RtlUnwindEx

Disclaimer: I've never actually written an unwind personality routine, so take what's here with a grain of salt. A few days back, I spent 30 minutes defending the C++ runtime's exception handling personality routine to the guy that has the less than enviable Read More...
Posted Thursday, March 15, 2007 8:24 AM by Kevin Frei | 1 Comments
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AMD64 unwind info gotchas

I had a brief e-mail exchange with one of the devs on the optimizer team about a checkin he put up for review. He modified the compiler so that it only aligns the stack for functions that call other functions - that's the typical definition in compiler Read More...
Posted Monday, March 12, 2007 10:34 AM by Kevin Frei | (Comments Off)

New Job, SP1

I recently switched from the lead of the Code Gen & Tools team for Visual C++ to the lead for the Code Gen team for the .Net Framework. I've not used managed code much, but for some classes of code, it sure does look easier to use [I'm working on Read More...
Posted Tuesday, December 19, 2006 9:42 AM by Kevin Frei | 3 Comments
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Speaking in 'public'...

I'll be hanging out with the cool kids at the Northwest C++ Users Group tomorrow night. If you're in the area, and want to heckle me, swing by. We'll be in building 40 at 6:30 PM. My talk starts at 7:00 PM. I'm talking about the actual runtime cost of Read More...
Posted Tuesday, October 17, 2006 8:35 PM by Kevin Frei | 4 Comments

Bug in x86 inline assembly to watch out for

Imagine this very lame code: int main() {} void BugAsm() { __asm { MOV [ESP+12],OFFSET main } } void(*BugAsmPt)()=&BugAsm; // this is just to make sure the function is not removed by /OPT:REF Now imagine your significantly less lame code doing something Read More...
Posted Tuesday, October 17, 2006 1:53 PM by Kevin Frei | 2 Comments
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A more flexible array template [and the evolution of the idea]

{Disclaimer - I started with a bunch of code from boost::array - it's a great implementation of the functionality it provides} While my day job doesn't generally allow me to goof around with advanced C++ features, I still managed to find time to do so Read More...
Posted Monday, September 18, 2006 2:17 PM by Kevin Frei | 4 Comments
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ML64 bug to watch out for

If you're porting your application to x64, and you use much in the way of __asm in your x86 code, you're likely to start looking at ml64 - the 64 bit version of Masm. The reason you're likely to do this is that the x64 compiler doesn't support __asm blocks Read More...
Posted Thursday, July 20, 2006 1:45 PM by Kevin Frei | (Comments Off)
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Visual C++ Code Gen & Tools bugs

My role for the past 6 months (and the next several) I'm charged with effectively "going down with the ship" WRT the current generation of code gen & tools for Visual C++. This includes the linker, Masm, ml64, DIA, c2, pdb, and a few other miscellaneous Read More...
Posted Thursday, July 20, 2006 1:22 PM by Kevin Frei | 2 Comments

Language & Library Evolution

Let’s say you have a programming language, K-- version 1.0, with it’s accompanying runtime library, stdK--. And it turns out that the language needed some new features, like concepts, thread safety, concurrency, a strong memory model, improved security, Read More...
Posted Thursday, May 25, 2006 9:36 PM by Kevin Frei | 1 Comments
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